There is a lot of good writing about why such false logic persists. I won’t rehash it.

But what can you say about sexual assault? When bad information and horrible commentary are dominating a news story, I always find it helpful to look for facts that we know to be true and ask questions that might help our understanding.

Women are more likely than men to be victims of sexual assault. The statistics on this are conclusive, even though it’s hard to say what the real incidence of rape is. Because sexual assault is vastly under-reported to authorities, researchers turn to surveys to determine the actual incidence. Studies estimate that over the course of her lifetime, somewhere between 12 to 25 percent of women are sexually assaulted.

Children are commonly victims of sexual assault, so in that way, the attack on Logan, like most of the assaults that get news coverage, was out of the ordinary.

We don’t know why Logan’s attackers assaulted her. Were they just an out-of-control mob? Were they pro-Mubarak supporters trying to intimidate outside journalists? Were they attacking her because of her ethnicity or a perception of her religion? We don’t know for sure. We might never know.

Most of the time,journalists do not reveal the names of survivors of sexual assault, because the crime is such an invasion of privacy. CBS officials said they released details of the assault on Logan after a reporter from the Associated Press called. One would assume Logan was part of that decision.

Most victims appreciate the privacy. Some do not. They feel that going nameless reinforces the notion that what happened to them wasn’t real, or wasn’t that bad, or was their fault.

My first instinct, when a reporter told me about Logan’s assault, was to be quiet. I thought about Logan’s privacy and about how I knew some would respond, blaming her for what happened. I didn’t want to add fuel to that fire.

But when we turn away from a sexual assault, we amplify the voices that would blame the victim or minimize the attack. Our instinct to avert our eyes leaves the victim to face a world of judgment on her own.

There is so much we can say about sexual assault. As a society, we rarely talk about it, until a particularly dramatic event. Then we talk about the circumstances of the event: Where was she? What happened? In asking those questions, we allow myths and suspicions to guide our conversations. But we forget to bring in all the facts that we do know.

So if we talk about Logan’s ordeal, let’s do so in the context of things we know to be true.

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AUTHOR INFORMATION

Kelly McBride is a media ethicist and Poynter's Vice President for Academic Programs. She was a daily newspaper reporter in the Northwest for 15 years. She is a leading expert on covering sexual assault, suicide and mental health issues, plagiarism, and the connection between an ethical press and a strong democracy.